[ Error Correction
- The following story contains the statement: "What
is not so well remembered is that John Negroponte was the
US Ambassador to the UN in 1972." The US Ambassador
to the UN in 1972 was George HW Bush. Negroponte was a
member of the
Career Foreign Service, working with Henry Kissinger. - Our apologies, FTW ]

[In this two-part
analysis, Stan Goff exposes the underlying forces
driving the current crisis in Haiti. The recent
coup d'etat is only the latest in two centuries
of violent transfers of power in that country – but
today the regional balance of forces is refreshingly
new. Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has foiled
a series of desperate CIA attempts to gain control
of that oil-producing nation. While the Bush
administration arrogantly plays the same the
old game in the same old way, using the same
old felons and convicted murderers, new rules
are being written by an awakening transnational
solidarity in the hemisphere. Markets, privatization
of natural resources, drug routes, cheap labor – all
are at stake in the US elite's scramble for Haiti.
But Goff shows how an even more important motivation
is stinging the Bush junta into frenzied action:
when white supremacy is symbolically wounded,
others have to bleed.

Haiti was
founded in 1804 after a roundly successful slave
revolution. Aristide is Haiti's first democratically
elected President. Just before his kidnapping
at gunpoint, he had moved to double the Haitian
minimum wage. And the prospect of a dignified,
self-governing Haiti free from the depredations
of U.S. economic warfare and CIA intervention
is intolerable to the heroes of American exceptionalism.
Neoconservative ideologues, Jesse Helms-style
Southern racists, Miami exilios and organized
crime players, intelligence men embarrassed by
even a whisper of successful populism – these
are the planners of the coup and the cover-up.
Many learned their trade in the Iran-Contra period,
or have mentors who did; the pattern hasn't changed.
Just as Nicaraguan self-determination seemed to
threatened the whole universe during the Reagan
administration, from the perspective of Washington
and Langley a strong Haiti – under an electorally
legitimate Black president with a mandate and regional
allies – would surely bring the Earth crashing
into the Sun. – FTW]

Stan Goff, Master
Sergeant, U.S. Army Special Forces (Retired) is
author of Hideous Dream: A Soldier's Memoir of
the U.S. Invasion of Haiti (Soft Skull Press, 2000),
and Full Spectrum Disorder: The Military in the
New American Century Soft Skull Press, (February
9, 2004).

_____

Gonaives Adventure

March 23, 2004 1800 PST (FTW)
-- In 1994, when my last Special Forces team,
Operational Detachment Alpha 354, entered the
Haitian city of Gonaives, I along with three members
of that detachment waded through a huge and agitated
crowd to encounter four soldiers and two plainclothes
death squad members about to fire into that crowd
with M-1 Garands. They were surprised to see us,
and we took advantage of that surprise to compel
them to lay their weapons down and submit to arrest.
One of the plainclothes gents hesitated to relinquish
his weapon, and I came very near shooting him.
I'm only being honest – knowing
this will put some people off – when I say that I
now wish I had gone ahead and pulled the trigger.
Instead, I protected him from a very angry crowd,
one member of which lambasted him across the head
with a heavy stick when he finally laid his weapon
down, obliging my own team's medics to suture his
gaping scalp laceration.

The man in question, Jean
Pierre Baptiste, goes by the alias Jean Tatoune.
Only six months before, he had participated in
a massacre in the nearby slum called Raboteau.
One participant in that massacre, Carl Dorélien,
was given refuge in the United States, where he – somehow – won
the Florida lottery in 1997. [1] Last
year Jean Tatoune was busted out of jail, and now
he is acting as the paramilitary chief of Gonaives
as part of the latest successful, US-sponsored coup
d'etat in Haiti. [2] The
leader of the massacre at Raboteau was the Gonaives
Haitian Armed Forces (FAdH) commander, Captain
Senafis Castra, with whom we were ordered to cooperate
by the Task Force commanders during the 1994 invasion.
My team's arrest of Jean Tatoune was a deviation
from the script.

Many people continue to believe
that the US supported Aristide's return to the
Haitian presidency in 1994 because the Clinton
administration supported democracy. Nothing could
be further from the truth. The intelligence summaries
we received during his reinstallation were violently
anti-Aristide, and the policies pursued from
Day One were designed to ensure Aristide's neutralization
as the leader of Haiti. He spent three years in
talks with the United States trying to gain support
for his return, and during that time the United
States placed increasing pressure on him – especially
by allowing the body count of the Cedras-Francois
coup government to increase at the expense of Aristide
activists from the Lavalas movement he founded. It
is unlikely that the G.H.W. Bush administration would
have ever put Aristide back into office.

The Iran-Contra-Cocaine-Gusano
Connection Redux

This became part of the backdrop
of the 1992 US presidential election, leading to
the 1994 US military invasion that brought Aristide
back after the first US-supported coup against him.
A nd the question of Haiti has been intimately connected
to US partisan and race politics ever since. This
partisanship and race politics has involved both
American political parties, a cast of nefarious
Iran-Contra characters, and the Central Intelligence
Agency. The administration's international factotum
for the latest coup is Roger Noriega, and he's a
good starting point for any deconstruction of race,
empire, and Haiti.

Roger Noriega is the Assistant
Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs.
Before that, he was the United States Ambassador
to the Organization of American States (OAS).[3] But
his career got its running start when he became an
aide in the Bureau for Inter-American Affairs
of the US State Department. Like the Office of Public
Diplomacy for Latin America, this was an instrument
of the Reagan administration's campaign to destroy
the Sandinista government of Nicaragua. Dubbed “Iran-Contra” by
the press, that campaign was being run by a coterie
of felons including Elliot Abrams, John Negroponte,
John Poindexter, and Otto Reich. [4] The
Vice President during this episode was George Herbert
Walker Bush, former Director of Central Intelligence. [5]

Reagan's Office of Public
Diplomacy was run by Otto Reich, who zealously
planted scads of bogus stories in the press – for
instance, that MiGs were being shipped to Nicaragua,
that Sandinistas were persecuting Miskito Indians – all
untrue, but never recanted by the US press. [6] Dubya
tried installing Otto Reich as Assistant Secretary
of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs during a
legislative recess, but the returning Senate refused
to renew Reich's appointment. [7] In
August 2001, the job went to Mr. Noriega; but like
so many of the Iran-Contra werewolves, Reich is back
in the government. He's now reporting directly to
Condoleezza Rice from a special post (apparently
created just for him) called “Special Envoy for Western
Hemisphere Initiatives.” He's the kind of person
they have to keep moving around: toward the middle
of the second Reagan administration when the huge
cocaine element of Iran-Contra broke into view, Reich's
deep involvement with CIA assassin Felix Rodriguez
and terrorist Luis Posada Carriles became too obvious
for the administration's comfort, and off he went.
From 1986 to 1989 Reich was US Ambassador to Venezuela,
where he tried very hard to secure the release of
the Miami-mafia airline bomber Orlando Bosch. That
downing of a civilian passenger airline from Cuba
was an act of terrorism in which Posada Carriles
had also been implicated. [8]

That's all been forgotten somehow, and Otto is back
on the government payroll. His first task for Bush
II, which he performed with admirable enthusiasm
and success, was another disinformation campaign
against the democratically elected Venezuelan government
of Hugo Chavez.[9]

One of the high-level players
in Iran-Contra was John Poindexter, a retired Navy
admiral who specialized in illegal covert operations
and spying on American citizens. With Oliver North,
he engineered and oversaw the massive plot by the
Reagan administration to sell weapons to Iran (despite
the public show of bitter hostility between the
US and Khomeini's Iran), ship huge quantities
of cocaine into the United States via Central America,
and use the cash to buy illegal weapons and materiel
for Nicaraguan terrorists. Congress had cut off the
funding for aid to the right-wing “Contras,” so
Poindexter, North and the others simply moved their
operation outside the government by funding it with
cocaine.

Eventually convicted of several
felonies, the good Admiral Poindexter managed to
get them all thrown out in an immunity deal. He got
caught trying to destroy over 5,000 White House emails,
and was also the originator of yet another disinformation
campaign, this one directed at Libya's Col. Muammar
Qaddafi.[10] For
his sins, John Poindexter – now the Vice President
of Syntek Technologies, a surveillance technology
outfit with juicy federal contracts – was appointed
by Bush II to head up the sinister Information Awareness
Office (IAO), a subset of the Department of Defense's Defense
Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA, a
favorite of Donald Rumsfeld). IAO's main task is
to vastly expand the Pentagon's capacity to spy on
A merican citizens. But from the moment Poindexter's
appointment went public, the internet began to hum
with popular outrage about the IAO's domestic spying
program and Poindexter was canned.

John Negroponte is now the
United States' Ambassador to the UN. He's another
Cocaine-Contra figure with a great resume for disinformation.
In 1981, USA mbassador to Honduras, Jack Binns,
made the error of reporting that the Honduran military
was engaged in death-squad activity. This did not
sit well with the Reagan administration, who never
met a right-wing Latin A merican killer they didn't
like. Binns was fired and his job went to Negroponte.
Between 1981-1985, during Negroponte's diplomatic
tenure, there was a direct correlation between
the level of military violence – especially that
of the specially US-trained “intelligence” unit
called Battalion 3-16 – and the level of military
assistance provided to Honduras by the US taxpayer:
an increase from $4 million to $77.4 million. This
was when Honduras was being used as a launch platform
for the Nicaraguan Contras, as I can attest: when
I was in Ojo de Agua, Honduras, in 1991, the locals
informed us that the same base at which we were working
was used by the Contras.[11]

When the Senate later questioned Negroponte in the
course of the Iran-Contra investigation, Negroponte
said he had no knowledge of Battalion 3-16 or its
activities, indicating that he was either dead drunk
for four years or not actually staying in Honduras
where he was the ambassador(or, of course, that
he was lying through his teeth).

Through this whole sordid
period of death squads, the murders of nuns and
Catholic clerics, arms-and-cocaine swaps, and felony-as-executive-branch-policy,
the regional boss was Elliot Abrams, described
by friend and foe alike as a snarling macho asshole.
Convicted for his role in Iran-Contra as Reagan's
Assistant Secretary of State for Latin American
Affairs, Abrams was soon pardoned by George H.
W. Bush. And in what must be a sick joke, Bush
the Younger named Abrams Senior Director of the
National Security Council's “Office for Democracy,
Human Rights and International Operations.”

Last December, Peter Kornbluh of
the National Archives told a Newsday reporter:"The
resurfacing of the Iran-Contra culprits has been
nothing short of Orwellian in this administration.
These are not 21st-century appointments. They are
retrograde appointments, a throwback to an era of
interventionism when the U.S. was the big bully on
the block." There is much speculation that these
appointments – most intimates of the Miami-Cuban
right-wing and mafia – are a form of reciprocation
for gusano assistance with the Florida-based
judicial coup that put George W. Bush into the Oval
Office.

While Roger Noriega has been coordinating the details
of President Aristide's forcible removal from office,
Otto Reich has run the disinformation campaign in
the Organization of American States(OAS).[12]

Another institution for building
coups developed during the Reagan administration.
The CIA's covert operators had proven perfectly
capable of engineering the development of paramilitaries
and death squads, but they had proven unequal to
the task of developing political opposition to seated
governments. So the National Endowment for Democracy
was established. From Third World Traveler:

The
NED was set up in the early 1980s under President
Reagan in the wake of all the negative revelations
about the CIA in
the second half of the 1970s. The latter was a
remarkable period; spurred by Watergate-the Church
committee of the Senate, the Pike committee of
the House, and the Rockefeller Commission, created
by the president, were all busy investigating the
CIA.

Seemingly every
other day there was a new headline about the discovery
of some awful thing, even criminal conduct, the
CIA had
been mixed up in for years. The Agency
was getting an exceedingly bad name, and it was
causing the powers-that-be much embarrassment.
Something had to be done. What was done was not
to stop doing these awful things. Of course not.

What was done was to shift many
of these awful things to a new organization, with
a nice sounding name-The National Endowment for
Democracy.

The idea was that the NED
would do somewhat overtly what the CIA had been
doing covertly for decades, and thus, hopefully,
eliminate the stigma associated with CIA covert
activities. It was a masterpiece. Of politics,
of public relations, and of cynicism.[13]

The NED has four affiliates in the
United States: the Republican Party, the Democratic
Party, the US Chamber of Commerce, and the AFL-CIO.
The NED counterparts to these three entities are
the International Republican Institute, the Democratic
Institute for International Affairs, the Center
for International Private Enterprise, and the American
Center for International Labor Solidarity. There
is strong and growing opposition within the AFL-CIO
to ACILS, which is a throwback to the bad-old-days
of Cold War business-unionism.

The job of the NED is to funnel
funds, training, and support to reactionary political
groups in other countries in order to ensure political
outcomes that are favorable to the US elite. Their
most tried and true method has been to build, train,
finance, and control political alliances as “oppositions” to popular
governments considered too “left” for the US.

Allen Weinstein, who helped
draft the legislation establishing NED, was quite candid
when he said in 1991:"A lot of what we do today was done
covertly 25 years ago by the CIA." In effect,
the CIA has been laundering money through NED.
(Ibid.)

The National Endowment for
Democracy was invented by the Reagan administration
as a specialized outgrowth of the CIA's covert
operations apparatus. In emulation of the CIA's
now-famous string of murderous successes from Guatemala
to Chile, Indonesia to Iran, NED's mission is to
engineer “desirable” political/electoral
outcomes in other countries.

The
Helms School

US policy right now is
in the hands of the ideologues. You cannot overestimate
the relevance of these people in shaping US policy.
In a sense the Helms school of Haitian strategy
is at work here.

- Larry Birns, director of the
Council on Hemispheric Affairs

Roger Noriega's public antipathy
for Aristide began while Aristide was in office
the first time, when Noriega was working as a senior
advisor to the OAS. This public opposition to
Aristide – and Noriega's
connections with Miami's organized crime reactionaries – led
to an appointment to the staff of the arch-racist
Senator from my very own North Carolina, Jesse Helms.[14]

Helms was a personal friend to and
open supporter of Salvadoran death-squad commandante Roberto
D' Aubuisson, believed to have planned the assassination
of Archbishop Oscar Romero, one of the many outrages
that occurred in Latin America on the Reagan watch.[15]

Active opposition to Aristide by
Helms and Roger Noriega began at the very moment
of A ristide's surprise election victory in 1990,
when he overwhelmingly defeated the US-backed Haitian
presidential candidate, Marc Bazin, a World Bank
executive. This election made Aristide the first
democratically elected president of in Haitian history.[16]

Helms' antipathy to Aristide
is double-edged: Helms regards any form of independence,
any populism, any policy that makes inroads against
the power of the rich, to be “communist.” Helms
frequently referred to Aristide as a “Haitian
Castro.” And Jesse Helms
just plain doesn't like Black people. Foreign, Black,
Catholic, and populist – the only thing missing for
the pure embodiment of evil according to Helms would
be if Aristide were gay; Helms is also a notorious
homophobe.[17] In
the South, where political hegemony has been exercised
ever since the Nixon presidency, there is a long
standing belief that unions, race-mixing, and communism
are identical, and this remains Helms' view today.
One of the Ku Klux Klan's principal appeals forty
years ago(when Hoover's FBI was very much at home
with the good ole boys) was that they were a bulwark
against communism – which they opposed because communists
promoted racial “mongrelization.”[18] Maybe
Roger Noriega shares Mr. Helms' special political
pathology. But it's more likely that our new Assistant
Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs
is driven by his self-perception as a guardian of
the empire in Latin America, and shaped by his origins
in that particular region of the South that is Miami.

The former U.S. Ambassador
to El Salvador, Robert White, was among those
fired by Reagan for speaking out on human rights
violations. Just days before the present coup d'etat
culminated with the Aristide's removal and detention
by the U.S. Marines, White commented: “ Roger Noriega
has been dedicated to ousting Aristide for many,
many years, and now he's in a singularly powerful
position to accomplish it."

Recalling the Helms-Noriega efforts
to prevent Aristide's return to Haiti in 1994, Dr.
Heather Williams wrote in Haiti as Target Practice:
How the US Press Missed the Story:

As senior staff member
for the Committee on Foreign Relations of the
U.S. Senate, and advisor to Senator Jesse Helms
and John Burton, he [Roger Noriega] was party
to a three-year campaign to defame Aristide
and prevent his return to power; all the while
CIA-backed thugs left carnage in the streets
daily in Port Au Prince. In his capacity in
the State Department since 2003, and for two
years before that as the U.S. Permanent Representative
to the OAS, he has aggressively advertised
his intention to oust Aristide a second time.
For example, in April of last
year, speaking at the Council of the Americas
conference in Washington, he linked U.S. policies
in Haiti to those in Venezuela and Cuba … He
added that"President Chavez and President
Aristide have contributed willfully to a polarized
and confrontational environment. It is my fervent
hope," he added
ominously,"that the good people of Cuba are
studying [this]."[19]

While there is no doubt that the Reagan administration
was a shaker and mover in Latin America and the Caribbean,
to really get at the roots of covert operations,
coups d'etat, and the connections to race-politics
in the United States, we have to go back just a bit
further.

Plan Condor

In 1948, the CIA inaugurated
its “Office of Policy
Coordination,”(OPC) headed up by Frank Wisner, a
Wall Street lawyer (the deep-political connection
between Wall Street and the CIA has been the subject
of several books, and should be the subject of several
more). The OPC's responsibilities included, in its
own words,"propaganda, economic warfare, preventive
direct action, including sabotage, anti-sabotage,
demolition and evacuation procedures; subversion
against hostile states, including assistance to underground
resistance groups, and support of indigenous anti-communist
elements in threatened countries of the free world." [20] In
the 1960's one of the targets of these operations
was a new Haitian leader named Francois Duvalier.
This is a not-well-known fact on the right or the
left in the United States, who only seem to remember
when Papa Doc(Duvalier's infamous nickname) and
the CIA were working together. But if we don't understand
this, we cannot understand Haitian- American relations,
so I will return to this subject further down.[21]

In the wake of the economic crisis
caused by Vietnam, the US colonial playground called
Latin America took on a new significance. The story
of Secretary of State Henry Kissinger's involvement
in the 1973 CIA-supported coup d'etat against
democratically elected President Salvador Allende
in Chile is well known. What is not so well remembered
is that John Negroponte was the US Ambassador to
the UN in 1972, as was George Bush the Elder in 1973.
Bush took over the CIA in 1975. At that time, DCI
Bush launched Plan Condor, designed to wipe out
political opposition to US-supported regimes in Latin
America. As part of Condor, the green light was
given to the then-fascist government of Argentina
to slaughter 30,000 political opponents between 1976
and 1983.

Who were some of the shakers and
movers for Plan Condor? Orlando Bosch and Luis Posada
Carriles, the future gusano bombers of
a civilian passenger airliner.

These are some of the bloodiest
personnel behind the many right-wing seizures of
power in Latin America and the Caribbean. In
fact, the Argentinean military helped train Negroponte's
unacknowledged Honduran Battalion 3-16. The US
was assisted liberally in its training of repressive
forces in the region by the Israelis, who seemed
weirdly indifferent to the fact that the Argentinean
military tortured Jewish prisoners under portraits
of Hitler to enhance the intimidation effect. But
then the Israelis were staunch supporters of racist
South Africa then as well. Israel actually set
up a Galil assault rifle factory in Guatemala,
and when I was there for the last coup in 1983,
the Galil was the most popular weapon in the country.
The strong relation between Israel and the modern-day
Zionist neocons – whatever
their various religious and ethnic identities, be
it noted – is not new. The centrality of the Saudis
is not new either.

This consortium of forces
(Saudis, Israelis, CIA, Contras, and local reactionaries
in Latin American and the Caribbean) was laundering
money through the phony Bank of Commerce and Credit
International(BCCI), which had links – too numerous
and complex to recount here – with the bin Ladens
and the Bush family; that money was being used
to finance covert operations. BCCI collapsed after
revelations about its connections to the Medellin
cartel of Colombia brought down the whole house
of cards. [22] These
would become the key players in the Iran-Contra-Cocaine
affair because, as we say among activists, organizing
is based on relationships.[23]

There are those critics out
there who will, at this juncture, say this is conspiracy
theorizing, and that conspiracy theory is somehow
the antithesis of class analysis. At the risk
of seeming rude, let me say that this is idiotic.
It is a false dichotomy. To pretend dominant classes
exist as some kind of autonomous abstraction without
any personal agency inside a deterministic system
ignores that members of any social class are people.
To assume that these people do not scheme to protect
their class interests – or
that we should not concern ourselves with how those
schemes work – strikes me as a recipe for inaction.[24]

There is a very good reason why
the CIA continually works with drug traffickers.
The money is untraceable. They don't take the
drugs. My experience is that they work out of embassies
and are addicted to embassy fare – Scotch and martinis.
And they don't sell the drugs. They facilitate and
skim. George W. Bush, however… well, never mind.

US
Domestic Partisan Politics – The Southern Strategy

Since the late 19 th Century,
when Reconstruction was dismantled, the Democratic
Party had openly and proudly claimed to be “the Party of White Supremacy,” and
Republicans – still identified with Lincoln, and
therefore with Blacks – were incapable of getting
elected in the South.[25] Kennedy
and Johnson were seen as the great betrayers, and
the Republican Party sensed an opening.

In 1968, the Nixon campaign
fell upon an electoral strategy that would create
a tectonic political shift, the “Southern Strategy.”[26] Southern
white racists perceived the end of Jim Crow(the
legal system of Southern US apartheid) as a catastrophic
threat to their privileged status. Outbreaks of their
bitter resentment were called “white backlash” in
the press. Barry Goldwater, the reactionary Senator
from Arizona who was trounced by Lyndon Johnson
in 1964 was rabidly opposed to the Civil Rights Act.
In spite of his poor showing nationwide, he showed
his greatest strength in the South, as did independent
segregationist George Wallace.

The barely coded appeal used
by Goldwater, who didn't feel empowered to call
as openly as Wallace for a return to legal apartheid,
was “states' rights,” understood
by every white Southerner as the battle cry in defense
of slavery and its legacy. Out of Goldwater's wreckage,
Nixon built the Republican strategy that has won
overwhelming support from Southern white voters since
LBJ went back to the ranch. African American political
critic Lee Hubbard writes:

"Substantial Negro support is not necessary
to national Republican victory," said Kevin
Phillips, the mastermind behind Nixon's Southern
Strategy, at the time."The GOP can build
a winning coalition without Negro Votes. Indeed,
Negro-Democratic mutual identification was a major
source of Democratic loss, and Republican Party
or(George Wallace's) American Independent Party
profit, in many sections of the country."

Since then, some Republicans
have played to these fears to gather white votes.
Their game has ranged from the kickoff of Ronald
Reagan's presidential campaign when he declared
he"believed in
states rights," in Philadelphia, Mississippi
-- the site of the deaths of civil rights martyrs
Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman -- to Vice President's
Bush's 1988 Willie Horton ad campaign, which basically
depicted all blacks as being criminals. Some of
the GOP's race-baiting has been, perhaps, unintentional,
and at other times it has been blatant, but it
has happened, and black people are familiar with
this list of racial baggage.[27]

Richard Nixon's campaign effected the decisive transfer
of the potent political mantle of white supremacy
from the Democratic Party to the Republicans. It
is important to understand that foreign policy is
not solely determined by foreign priorities, either
economic or strategic. It is also significantly influenced
by its impact on popular domestic political bases.

HAITIAN
HISTORY, VENEZUELA AND WHITE MEN'S FEARS

This is particularly relevant
to Haiti. The Haitian Revolution that culminated
in the first Black Republic on January 1, 1804,
was fought against three imperial powers, including
Napoleon's armed forces, by rebel slaves. These
slaves out-generaled, out-administered, and out-fought
the European giants, smashing the myth of white
supremacy. This struck terror into the American
South, where the fear of Black rebellion was a
constant obsession. Turmoil in Haiti is always
portrayed by the American mainstream press in
a way that explains as little as possible, so as
to reinforce the impression of amorphous chaos – read:
Black deviance and incapacity for self-governance.
That tactic has distracted the television-drugged
US public from yet another coup attempt afoot, the
second in less than two years, in Venezuela. I h
av e read do zen s of articles over the last few
days on both Haiti and Venezuela, and none of them
mentions race or racism as a factor in these coup
attempts. This is an elephant in the living room.
Unfortunately, most Americans in the living room
h av e been blindfolded.

In 1994, just before the United
States launched the invasion of Haiti that became
my last deployment, Paul Farmer published an excellent
book called The
Uses of Haiti.[28] He
described America's horrifically successful Haitian
policy of blaming the victim while continuing to
strangle him. For instance, it's often pointed out
that Haiti's capital city, Port-au-Prince is overpopulated,
jerrybuilt, and afflicted by almost irremediable
drainage and waste-disposal problems. Huge numbers
of peasants continually leave the countryside in
search of work in the city, forming overcrowded,
sprawling bidonvilles (shantytowns) with
little or no potable water or electricity. But mainstream
American papers rarely go on to explain what drives
this process: as foreign agribusiness disrupted the
Haitian sharecropping system, land enclosure and
mechanization(as well as terrible soil erosion)
forced more and more people off the land and into
the cities to seek work that was not available except
to a very few(accounting for the criminally low
wages paid in Port-au-Prince by foreign manufacturers).
Paradoxically, the Artibonnite valley which grows
enough rice to feed Haiti ships most of its product
abroad to get export dollars, and the US ships(taxpayer
subsidized) rice into Haiti at prices most Haitians
can ill afford.

So Haiti is strangled by the Washington
economic consensus(neoliberalism), then blamed for
not getting its act together, because most Americans
haven't a clue what these international trade policies
are or how they work.

And that's just the economic assault.
The biggest fear of the right wing and its para-political
gangs is a strong effort by the Haitian state to
establish the rule of law within its sovereign territory.
This becomes incredibly difficult when weapons and
equipment for the police are embargoed, and the 75%
urban unemployment rate forces large numbers of people
into various criminal enterprises to survive.

In the wake of the latest coup, Haiti is an utter
legal shambles.

[Aside: Though this is often overstated
inside Haiti, the country has become one of many
regional stepping stones for drug-running operations
in this hemisphere. This will now get considerably
worse, since many of the FRAPH hoodlums were deeply
involved in drug trafficking. Just as South-Central
Los Angeles was chosen as the CIA's ideal market
for its Contra-funding crack-cocaine bakesale, we
can reasonably expect that Haiti will now be prized
by those same forces for the same reasons. It's now
a stateless milieu whose legal infrastructure has
been so degraded that it offers political criminals
a path of least resistance.]

This process has served as an important
ideological pillar for white supremacy in the United
States. From slavery to Jim Crow, to the de facto
segregation that easily survived the Civil Rights
Movement, white America has profited from racist
ideology and the economic crimes it was invented
to legitimize. Haiti's successful slave revolution
at the dawn of the 19th Century shook that ideology,
and prompted economic and political attacks by both
France and the United States.

As Paul Farmer and other critics
have shown, the message of the American press remains
essentially racist and colonial; Haiti is subtly
but unmistakably represented as inscrutably mad,
animalistic, diseased, and deviant.

Ever since Nixon managed the
Republican Party's displacement of the Democrats
as the party of white supremacy, Republicans have
taken a special responsibility for putting Haiti
in its place. Just after Aristide's ouster, Florida
Republican Mark Foley, in a CNN exchange with the
priceless Maxine Waters, said the US will help Haitians
learn how to run a government and “how
to grow crops.” A white f--king rich man from Florida,
whom the website Democratic Underground named Number
Two on its Top Ten Conservative Idiots list,
is talking about teaching Haitians how to grow
crops![29]

Note that the US-selected heir apparent
in this coup is a white Haitian, Andre A, paid a
Duvalierist sweatshop tycoon who has an American
passport.[30] The
last US appointee after the last coup d'etat was
light-skinned Raoul Cedras. This is a reflection
of the still complicated class-race interfusion in
Haiti, but also of a comfort threshold among American
patrons – which would include craven opportunists
like Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice. Race serves class:
Duvalier came to power using a nationalistic appeal
to black consciousness(“ noirisme ”), and
ruled in behalf of the nationalistic big landowners
in Haiti, whose way of life was threatened by US-sponsored
capitalist agriculture(as opposed to the semi-feudal
sharecropping system that enriched these grandons (big
landowners). That mechanized capitalist agriculture
was introduced to Haiti under the rule of the US
Marine occupation from 1915-1934, as was the brutal
Haitian National Guard, whom Duvalier distrusted
and many of whom participated in a failed coup attempt
against Duvalier(supported by the CIA). It was
in response to the political unreliability of the
Haitian armed forces that Duvalier developed the
Gestapo-like Tonton Macoute militia to impose by
terror a political discipline not only on the population
but on the armed forces until he could redevelop
its leaders and members into a force more consistently
loyal to him.

It was the Tonton Macoute
that gave Duvalier his fierce reputation, and which
Duvalier would eventually use on behalf of US interests,
when he and the US later mended their fences in
exchange for his massacre of leftists in Haiti
and his regional support of US “anti-communist” efforts.

Duvalier's authoritarian brutality then served him
to control the Haitian population, as well as serving
US interests in the region. It also had the added
benefit in the US, unintended by the noiriste despot,
of providing ideological support to white supremacy
by reinforcing notions of Black brutishness.[31]

White privilege and white supremacy
are still embraced at some level by the majority
of the white US population.[32] This
embrace is not always the same as it was – unconcealed
and unabashed – under Jim Crow or in South Africa
during Apartheid. More often it is coded, socially
inscribed through the erasure of history, ideologically
inscribed as erasure of the social construction of
individual agency(personal responsibility, etc.),
and psychologically inscribed with Negrophobia – the
personal internalization of racial stereotypes that
regards Black male bodies as predatory, Black female
bodies as hypersensual, and Black intellect as inferior.
This is one of the foundation stones of Republican
Party success.[33]

I know some on the left will
take me to task for emphasizing race by insisting
that class is the deeper issue, but I don't buy
it. When we can extricate the two in any but a
theoretical way, I'll give this class-over-race
argument another listen. White supremacy has been
and remains a pillar of Euro- American power,
and not in some merely discursive way that “divides
and conquers” workers, though that's certainly part
of it. And imperialism is the issue, too, rationalized
through notions of the “white man's burden.”

Bush
the Elder and Clinton on Haiti

During the 1992 election, Bill Clinton
excoriated George W. Bush for his incarceration of
Haitian refugees in the concentration camp at Guantanamo
Bay, Cuba. Playing to his Black audience, whom Clinton
would betray in his later policies at every turn,
Clinton also pointed quite justifiably to the hypocrisy
of allowing white Cubans automatic entry into the
US, while indefinitely detaining black Haitians.[34]

The coup of a year earlier was proceeding apace
with its slaughter of Aristide loyalists and grassroots
organizers, and CIA complicity in the coup was becoming
gradually more visible with a leak here and a whisper
there.

Then the economy tanked after
George H. W. Bush had made his famed “read my lips” remark,
and Bill Clinton was elected.

Faced with the reality of Haiti's desperation and
the volume of refugees fleeing the Cedras-Francois
regime, and faced with the reality of Florida politics
and the possibility of 100,000 or more penniless
people crashing onto its shores, Bill Clinton's first
foreign policy embarrassment was being forced by
his circumstances to treat the Haitians even more
harshly than the Bush regime had.

My own unit in 1993 was preparing
for an invasion of Haiti to re-install a reined-in
Aristide, but the debacle in Somalia put the whole
plan on hold for a year. While Haitians had originally
elected Aristide because of his opposition to
predatory neoliberal policies, Clinton now convinced
Aristide to support those same policies in order
to stop the killing. Clinton knew very well that
a US invasion would not be accepted by the people
of Haiti without Aristide – their first democratically
elected President, whom they now saw as a symbol
of their aspiration for genuine independence.

Aristide was to be re-installed
on October 30, 1993, according to an agreement between
Cedras and Clinton called the Governor's Island accords
(please see: http://dosfan.lib.uic.edu/ERC/briefing/dossec/1993/9310/931011dossec.html).
The USS Harlan County, carrying the military
and State Department facilitators, arrived in Port-au-Prince
on October 11 th. But the officials who were designated
to meet the craft had been replaced by a handful
of FRAPH thugs(some of them drunk) waving pistols
and threatening to fire on anyone who disembarked.
So the USS Harlan County, an American
warship, was turned about and sent home by a band
of intoxicated bullies with Colt.45s. This was a
tremendous foreign policy embarrassment for President
Bill Clinton, who was at a loss to explain the situation
to the public.

This bizarre incident was rendered
even more fantastic by the nonchalant presence of
the American John Kambourian on the docks, unafraid
and unthreatened by the ostensible anti-American
gang. Kambourian was leaning on his vehicle with
a kind of Delphic smirk throughout this whole weird
interlude. Documentary film maker Katherine Kean
was on hand and secretly videotaped him.

Kambourian was the CIA's
man on station. He had been sitting in the car
with UN representative Vickie Huddleston, and the
FRAPHists made a kind of show of banging on the
hood and shouting, “Kill whites!” for
the cameras. Neither Huddleston nor Kambourian seemed
alarmed, nor did Huddleston attempt to leave. It
was only later, when they didn't realize Kean had
a running camera, that Kambourian exited the car
to catch some air and suppress a smile at the little
performance. The FRAPH, after all, were Kambourian's
boys. In dissecting the current coup, we will see
that the FRAPH is back in Haiti, and that this
year they provided the paramilitary terrorism that
precipitated the forcible removal of Aristide… again.

Present during the 1993 USS
Harlan County fiasco
was the chief of the FRAPH, Emmanuel “Toto” Constant.
Only later would the public learn that Constant was
on the CIA payroll before, during, and after the
1991 coup d'etat. Little wonder Kambourian
was so comfortable relaxing outside during the Harlan
County “riot.” Constant
was taken in by the United States and now lives in
Queens, NY collecting Happy Meal toys and(by many
accounts) spending happy hours with his local cocaine
dealers. His threats to expose his CIA relations
pressured the US into protecting him from extradition.[35]

Note that in this episode the CIA
was subverting its own Director. There is no indication
that R. James Woolsey, the newly appointed DCI was
complicit in Kambourian's fake riot; in fact, it
would be surprising if he were. He was a Clinton
appointee, and like the next Clinton DCI, John Deutch,
he served on the Boards of Directors of various big
Defense contractors. The transparently orchestrated
sabotage of Clinton's Haiti policy was probably
the work of the field agents within the CIA who
move up to become station chiefs. By and large, their
politics are racist and reactionary, if my own association
with them is any indication. I never once met an
exception. They are certainly nothing like the Tom
Clancy caricatures we see in the movies. I invite
readers to read my own accounts in Full Spectrum
Disorder – The
Military in the New American Century (Soft
Skull Press, 2004) http://www.softskull.com/detailedbook.php?isbn=1-932360-12-3.
This Republican bias, which included a Jesse Helms-like
aversion to both Haiti and Aristide, was prevalent
among white officers in the military during the 1994
invasion, and among white Special Operations personnel.

Bush the Elder – former Director
of Central Intelligence – had
his vengeance on Bill Clinton with the Harlan
County incident.
Clinton was likely reluctant to call anyone's bluff
on issues related to the CIA, because he himself
was vulnerable on his own complicity in another CIA
operation, which we have mentioned earlier: Iran-Contra.
His was not a central role, but given the cocaine
politics of the Agency in its efforts to destroy
the Sandinistas, it was more than a little discomfiting.

CLINTON,
COCAINE AND CONTRAS

Bill Clinton comes from my Mom's
home town, Hot Springs, Arkansas. In his campaigns,
he said he was from Hope, Arkansas, where his
own mother lived for a while, partly because Hope
sounds so cool in a political campaign, and partly
because Hope is only famous for its very excellent
watermelons. Hot Springs was for years a Southern
gambling mecca, teeming with every kind of hustle
one might imagine, and a favorite getaway for organized
crime figures. All the gambling except Oaklawn Racetrack
has disappeared now, and the town is trying with
only partial success to reinvent itself in the midst
of a statewide economic crisis. Drug-addicts, fishermen,
Wiccans, criminals, hillbillies, artists, doddering
retirees, and militia-types still co-exist there
in a kind of slow-motion cultural free-for-all. This
may account for Clinton's chameleon-like capacity
to protectively color himself.[36]

Back in 1985, when I was working
in El Salvador, Bill Clinton was the Governor
of Arkansas. In that capacity, he consented to
let a little airport at Mena(an hour and a half
west of Hot Springs, near the Oklahoma border)
be used by CIA contract-pilots who were… shipping
cocaine north and guns south. The exact nature
and level of his role remains in question, partly
because of a river of disinformation from right-wing
ideologues.[37] The
result has been the almost complete disappearance
of the Mena story from public discourse; liberals
associate it with right-wing lies, so they won't
touch it. But like Waco, another fascist cause
celebre, there really was something that was
terribly wrong done there, and there is probably
plenty to cover up. Certainly it would disincline
Clinton to go after the CIA.

HAITI INVASION – CLINTON
AND BUSH FACTIONS

Instead, in 1994, he invaded Haiti,
and on October 15 th of that year, Aristide returned.
Members of both parties have desired Aristide's
ouster since he won the 2000 election, and while
the Democrats lean toward the comprador-technocrats
of the Haitian elite, the Republicans prefer the
FRAPH-macoutes.

It would be Bush and the FRAPH that
would help the phony Haitian “opposition” to
finish its four-year coup. It would also be Bush,
with Otto Reich on point, who would attempt to
support the failed coup in Venezuela, and who
is trying now to set up another.

The interests of the Republicans
diverge from those of the Democrats based on their
constituencies. Both parties are run by elites who
want to see the removal of Aristide and others who
have the capacity to mobilize their population. But
where Democrats would prefer something that looks like
a success story – along with
managed elections and other trappings of “progress” – Republicans,
as the party that still employs its latter-day version
of the Southern Strategy, want to see Haiti
in chaos. They will put on the mask of paternalistic
sympathy while they continue to impose dysfunction,
but they need Haiti to continue to serve as an example
of Black incapacity for self-governance – which reinforces
their white supremacist appeal to the Helms wing of
the party. There is, in my opinion, a kind of imperfect
comparison that can be made between Haiti and the American
South that sheds further light on American-Haitian
ruling class relationships.